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This Week in Venture Capital – Episode 2

Both Sides of the Table

Because GoTo.com was his idea. It was the first company to do “paid search&# back when Larry & Sergey were saying they would never do it. billion to Yahoo! plus a large settlement on patent disputes paid from Google) so Bill did well on it. But bill is a BIG idea guy. Overture sold for $1.6

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Why Has LA Suddenly Gotten So Much Attention from VCs and Entrepreneurs?

Both Sides of the Table

What was Bill Gross’s heretical idea as portrayed to the tech elite? He presented a system where your search results would be ranked based on companies bidding for placement and where merchants would be charged on a “cost per click” basis (CPC). You can hear many other amazing stories in this 1:1 interview ).

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Your Product Needs to be 10x Better than the Competition to Win. Here’s Why:

Both Sides of the Table

He invented the category of sponsored search. He presented the idea at the TED conference in the mid 90′s and was literally boo’d while he was on stage. At the time when you did a search on Lycos, Alta Vista or similar for a category such as Cars you ended up getting 9 spam results and 1 proper website to meet your needs.